The spirit of modern liberal social and political thought, in
the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Frederick A.
Hayek, has been recently brought to bear in support of the
fundamental notion of persons as centers of creative freedom,
ideally formed in the "virtue of enterprise" (M. Novak, Free
Persons and the Common Good, 1989). Concurrently there is
widespread recovery of the neglected reality of community,
even to the point of a re-emergence of the concept of the
common good into public discourse. It would be hard to name
a thinker who was so uncompromisingly committed to (both) the
creative, enterprising freedom of individual persons (and)
the establishment of a common good not reducible to the
particular goods of individuals as was Yves Simon. The
central, organizing concept in Simon's social and political
theory is authority. Indeed, authority is the "arch-premise"
in Simon's integration of a robust personal freedom so
esteemed in the liberal tradition and an integral,
hierarchical community so central to classical political
thought.
What is remarkable, and perhaps counter-intuitive, is the
sense in which authority nourishes personal freedom. One
might readily see how authority assists communitarian
interests. Similarly one might imagine how a case could be
made that the exercise of personal freedom maximizes
attainment of the common good. But it is not so clear how
authority equally and by its very nature serves both
particular and common goods. Yet just such a vision lies at
the heart of Simon's practical philosophy. Contrary to most
modern theorists and against the prevailing public
philosophies of our day, Simon insisted upon the intrinsic
good of authority. It is this case, particularly as
developed in his A General Theory of Authority, we shall
develop in the present essay.
In what follows we shall first situate authority within a
basic sketch of civil society. Ideas of community, the
common good, and common action prove central to the account
and are therefore subject to discussion in part two. In part
three we directly discuss the nature of authority. At its
best and by its nature, authority fosters individual self-possession of creative freedom.
Although this possession is
a great (desideratum), in Simon's view of things it is not
gained without acknowledging a more profound incorporation of
the individual in communal reality than is often taken for
granted. We conclude with part four, making the case for the
intrinsic goodness of authority as nurse of both the common
good and personal freedom.
I
Simon takes it for granted that human beings are by nature
social creatures. The variety of associations in which human
life transpires is grounded in an essential teleological
dynamism of each human soul. This is to say, one's
involvement in society has a fulfillment or satisfaction in
its own right, apart from whatever good is brought about
through or as a consequent result of this social involvement.
Furthermore, these associations, fulfillments of natural
human impulses, be it family, tribe, guild, church or state,
are works of art and reason. Incorporation in the community
is part of man's nobility. His excellence, his happiness,
the very nature of his innate capacity to be a complete
thriving person requires a share in good which is proper to
the community. As a constituted entity the community enjoys
a life of common action. Indeed, common action is the life,
the work, the living substance of the community. The common
action itself is for the sake of the common good.
We locate the meaning and reality of authority directly in
connection with the concept of a corporate entity engaged in
common action for the sake of a common good. Authority is
the voice of practical reason speaking for the community,
giving unity to its action in pursuit of the common good.
Authority's two chief functions are choice and intention.
Authority is the agent who chooses the means the community
employs in its securing and preserving the common good.
Authority is also charged by the community to intend, to will
as its end, the common good in an especially single-minded
way. It is the special character of this intention of the
common good which is the most essential function of
authority. Speaking metaphorically, authority is the
functional head of the community body. As such, its primary,
overarching work is to give unity to the community's action.
What it in fact comes down to is that authority is the
practical reason of a community, it is the prudence of an
acting corporate entity.
II
Let us look closer at the notions of community, common good,
and common action since they provide the immediate context
for understanding authority. We should like to see more
clearly these facets of communal life, of which authority is
in some sense the cause and form. Indeed as already
suggested, authority has its being precisely in the
maintenance of human community.
Community. Each human being belongs to a variety of
associations, be it a family, clan, church, club, team,
business, committee or society. Within these associations
each member performs identifiable activities toward the
establishment of some end or purpose of the association.
Whether it be a church worshipping, a hockey team seeking
victory, or a business working for a product and profit, each
association marshals the activities of its many members
toward its respective end.
Associations divide into partnerships and communities. In a
partnership there is no common action, no action proper to
the association when taken as a whole. Rather, action can be
interpreted without remainder as the sum of individual
actions undertaken in behalf of the association's end.
Furthermore this end is divisible and enjoyed privately by
the various associates, each according to his or her fair
share, a distribution established in advance according to a
contract, whether implicitly or explicitly. Simon calls such
ends, "a common interest." For a concrete example consider a
business partnership, composed of a builder and a banker. At
its simplest, the banker provides capital, and the builder
builds. The partnership is struck by a contract the terms of
which are ordered to the eventual separate and exclusive
share of the common interest to be generated as a result of
each associate doing his or her own thing. In a partnership
reason is at work in the separate execution of each partner's
work; it is also at work in setting the terms of the
contract. Unless subsequent contingencies require revisions
of the contract, there is no activity of reason proper to the
partnership taken as a corporate entity. In this regard,
partnerships manifest reason in a way analogous to a machine;
the reason is an extrinsic, non-living factor in what it
regulates. There is from within the partnership itself no
subject, no center which regulates the partnership's unity in
response to the contingent particulars of the partners'
actions.
By contrast, a community is constituted in order that it
may achieve a common good through common action. The chief
differences between a partnership and a community lie in the
qualitative difference between the ends sought by the
associations' actions, and the qualitative difference between
the actions by which their ends are sought. These will be
taken up immediately below. But first we should add that,
whereas reason unifying the partnership reposes extrinsically
in the contract, the unity of a community lies within a
particular associate of the community, a person who carries
the special office of authority. First, however, we need to
clarify the notions of common good and common action.
Common Good. A community undertakes common action in order
to achieve a common good. Principally, the common good is
the end, the purpose, of the community's action. By contrast
with the end of a partnership's action, the common interest,
the common good is not something mainly to be enjoyed
privately after a division of the good into exclusive parts.
An example will put the matter clearly. Imagine the members
of a commune gathered around a festive dinner table laden
with the collective fruit of their labors. The food, in
whole or in part, belongs to no one individual member, but to
all collectively. Though one may be tempted to think of this
food as the commune's common good, this would be a mistake,
for the food is a perfection only to the extent that it is
divisible and enjoyed by being appropriated privately.
Furthermore, as each portion of the food is enjoyed the
collective whole is proportionally diminished: when one
member eats some there is less for the others. Finally, the
goodness of food is exhausted, without remainder, in the sum
of satisfactions of private consumptions. The good of food
at the meal represents the common interest. Now compare this
with the good of the good-humored conversation sustained at
the table throughout the meal. The conversation is
appropriable by each member according to their own measure.
Yet when one partakes, the whole is not diminished for the
others; there is even reason to think the whole is thereby
increased. The conversation represents a common good. It
bears the essential mark of indivisible, non-diminishing
fecundity.
We might ask: to whom does this common good belong? Since a
good is imputed to the subject whose power is perfected, and
since the good is not reducible to the sum of individual
satisfactions, we attribute the good to the corporate whole
of the commune at table. As an actual entity, the
conversation, like a poem or essay, has an integral
wholeness. Indeed the conversation assumes a form giving it
its unity and, correlatively, its perfection. The
perfection, the goodness of the conversation belongs to the
association of members taken as a whole: it perfects the
community beyond the sum of the satisfaction it begets in
individual members.
In a complete community, one more self-sufficient than the
example of the commune, its common goods would be represented
principally by its religious feasts and patriotic
celebrations, by its moral, intellectual, and artistic
culture. Secondarily, the complete community's common good
exists in the peace that prevails throughout the realm, in
the achievements of its systems of justice, transportation,
communication, and in the public health, to suggest only some
of the more prominent goods. All such goods perfect the
community out of an indivisible, non-diminishing plenitude.
They also all result from common action.
Common Action. The common good's commonness has been
explained as its non-diminishing, indivisible availability
for all members of the community. This public, universal
quality of the good has perfectibility transcending the sum
of particular satisfactions of individual members. The
collection of individuals, then, cannot be the proper subject
of the common good. We infer, then, it belongs to the
community taken as a whole. This means that the community is
a real subject whose actuality is in the perfection of the
common good. When we try to envision more concretely the
community's actuality we see it as a career with
distinguishable moments of activity. If we recall the
history of commune, whom we earlier imagined at table, its
conversation was such a moment. Or if we consider the more
complete community of a nation, its life includes high
moments of civic celebration, public worship and acts of
justice. Such activities are the culminations of generative
actions drawing upon the material and spiritual resources of
the entire community. If we take the concrete case of
worship, not only are churches built, priests trained, and
civic schedules arranged, but an entire tradition of prayer,
cult, scripture, and so on, is sustained throughout the
community. These sustaining pre-requisites represent
numberless actions undertaken with the end of public worship
in view. We might well wonder about the principle of unity
in this common action. How can the efforts of so many
particular agents in the midst of everyday life's mysterious
contingencies so regularly issue in the active reality of the
common good? There must be a mind behind all this,
responsible for its unity. Authority names the source of the
unity in the community's action in view of the common good.
And this action, in so far as it issues in the nonreducible
common good, is called the common action of the community.
III
With the elaboration of the concepts of community, common
good, and common action as a background, we are in position
to focus more directly on the reality of authority.
Authority, we recall, is the rule of a community's common
action on behalf of its common good. As a rule it gives
order and unity to action; through its action diverse efforts
are shaped into a single active power. Put more precisely,
authority is not so much the rule itself as it is its source:
it is the power of getting underway common action through
issuance of rules binding upon all members of the community.
Or in terms we suggested earlier, authority is communal
prudence.
In the realm of personal action, the proximate effect of
prudence is choice. If we follow Aristotle in understanding
choice as deliberate desire, we then consider the impulse of
desire under the direction of practical reason to issue in
action. Action, of course, is for the sake of the end. Now
adapting this basic sketch of personal action, to the realm
of the community, Yves Simon describes the two essential
functions of authority. The first essential function is
choice of means toward common action. The second, and more
important, function is the intention of the end which
orders the choice. Let us describe the first of these
functions.
In the ordinary course of things, community members give
their attention to matters more particular than the universal
goods of the community. Their personal action is undertaken
for the sake of private, personal goods -- seeking the welfare
of me and mine rather than ours. The father's care for
his family commands his attention, not matters of national
welfare, or the saleswoman for a business seeks the good of
her firm without any special concern for the common good of
the larger community. The unity or rationale in the father's
or the saleswoman's action derives from their personal
practical reason. But whence the unity when the community is
called to common action?
Perhaps all community members continually have an eye out for
the common good, and when action on its behalf is called for,
they are unanimous in their deliberated conclusion that thus
and so must be done. Can unanimity account for the unity of
action? It seems it can, so long as we can presume on the
part of all relevant community agents both a right intention
of the common good and agreement on the deliberated
conclusion that this is the proper means. Under such a
presumption we have common action and yet no need for
authority. But how likely is such a scenario of unanimity?
In the absence of unanimity there can be no common action
unless one turns to authority. Unanimity can fail for
several reasons. First, it fails if all members whose
efforts on behalf of the common good are required do not
intend the common good, for the means are deliberated only
with the end in view. Secondly, even if all members intend
the common good, not all necessary agents may agree on the
proper means due to deficient practical reasoning, perhaps
because of partial information, lack of experience, or simply
a poor mind. And thirdly, it may well be that all relevant
agents have the proper intention and exercise excellent
practical reasoning, but it just happens that there is more
than one rationally defensible means. In all three cases
authority is required. Authority makes the choice of means.
It decrees for the community a course of action, securing
practical agreement and channeling different desires to a
single rationale through a mixture of simple obedience,
persuasion, and coercion. Giving direction (deliberating the
means) and coordinating the active impulses (the agents'
passions and desires) are the two facets of authority's
choice.
Authority's Intention. In the scheme of Aristotelian-
Thomistic psychology, "intention" signifies the act of will
whereby an agent adheres to the end attainable through
choice. In the process of deliberating the means, the end is
kept in view through the agent's intention and thereby
exercises its teleological attraction. In the case of the
common good we need to distinguish two degrees of intention.
Every virtuous member of a community formally intends the
common good. But only those members in authority need to
intend the common good concretely. To explain this
distinction let us consider the example of Beatrice and
Katherine who belong to the same community. Beatrice is the
gardener and Katherine is the governor. Beatrice loves the
common good of her community and can be brought to act on its
behalf when the concrete particulars of her role in common
action are made evident. But her regard for the end is not a
concrete one. She does not hold it in view in a way that
provokes her practical reason to lay out the particular
requirements for the materialization of the common good.
Yves Simon would say she intends the common good "formally"
but not "materially." Beatrice's particular devotion is to
the particular good of her garden. Her material intention of
the good for the garden is what provokes her practical
intelligence. Katherine, on the other hand, in virtue of her
office of governor must intend the common good concretely.
Her concrete regard for the end provokes her practical
intellect. It is the governor in virtue of her complete love
of the common good who lays out the requirements for the
materialization of the common good. These requirements laid
out become the rule which solicits the particular efforts on
behalf of the common good exercised not only by Beatrice, the
gardener, but by Kateri, the procurator, George, the
gatekeeper, etc. On the basis of their own practical
judgment Beatrice, Kateri, and George intend concretely or
materially only their specialized, particular goods. Their
love of the common good is too sheerly formal to give them
any authoritative responsibility for the common good. Only
Katherine intends the common good materially as well as
formally. Yves Simon calls this concrete, material intention
of the common good, the "most essential function of
authority." To articulate and keep present in view the
common good as a concrete intentional object is authority's
primary capacity.
Someone must turn to the common good with such detail and
with practical reason in such readiness that there can be
choice. One must want something precisely as what emerges
against or in view of the common purpose. Such a view of the
purpose must be sufficiently clear and intense so as to
provoke practical reason to cast about for effective acts
toward the realization of that end. For instance, someone
must envision peace as a desirable object with sufficient
care so as to coordinate the diverse efforts of one's
military generals and diplomatic corps. We are not here
concerned with particular choices proper to the general or
the diplomat, nor even with the particular goods of victory
or negotiations, but rather with the concrete, effective love
of peace which subordinates the more particular efforts of
both general and diplomat to the cause of peace. Called
"material intention of the common good" by Simon, this love
differs from the sort required of virtuous citizens whose
love of peace is not the sort to issue in a universal plan of
action for the community.
IV
Two Differentiations in Community. It becomes evident how
authority responds to differentiations within a community.
These differentiations provide the raw spiritual resources
authority summons and forms in effective action. A good part
of Simon's genius consists in his account of authority as the
positive complement to the very excellence of diverse centers
of actions in a community. Further consideration of the
differentiations bring us to the issue of personal freedom as
a value to be essentially nourished by authority.
The fact that the human soul is possessed of both reason and
will, combined with its intrinsic social nature, gives rise
to two differentiations within a community. First of all,
communal excellence results from functional specialization.
The maintenance of a community requires the concentrated work
of soldiers, judges, doctors, teachers, scientists, public
administrators, etc. This differentiation can be taken two
ways. In one sense we refer to the effective achievement of
one's personal, particular goods by specializing and
subsequently exchanging from one's own surplus for portions
of surpluses of a different sort won through the alternative
specializations of others. The second sort of functional
differentiation refers to the division within the agency
devoted to achievement of the common good. For example, one
might consider the division of the federal government of the
United States into its executive, legislative and judicial
branches, or the division of the executive into its various
secretariats. In either case the overarching point is that
the community is constituted in the attempt to more
effectively achieve one's good (particular or common) by
cultivating diverse expertises with respect to parts of the
total human good. The idea is commonplace; Plato makes the
case for it in his Republic, so we need not rehearse it.
Let us emphasize, however, that part of the rationale for the
second functional specialization is that it allows for an
intentional devotion to a single aspect of the common good.
And this devotion, in turn, allows for the accumulation of
practical wisdom within the specialized crafts. Authority,
however, is required to channel these specialized efforts
toward the unity of common action. For example, the
soldier's excellence derives from his specialized devotion to
his craft, but from within that craft there is no prudence
for settling, let us say, peace negotiations. Yet the well-
being of a community will require the competencies of both
talents, as well as a sage integration of actions from both:
this is the work of authority. It unifies the variety of
creative but non-self-regulating functional differentiations
among agents engaged in common action.
A second differentiation within the community regards its
division into subjective parts. Simply put, the community
consists of a certain number of individual persons, each one
engaged as a mature citizen in the pursuit of his or her
private goods. This division can be expanded so as to
include subsidiary groups, as well as individuals, yet short
of the complete whole. Such private agents, if they are to
be virtuous, maintain a formal intention of the common good.
Yet this formal intention need not deflect their energies of
desire and prudence from their pursuit of private goods. To
be sure, realization of the common good may well restrain
one's exercise of his private capacity. But the limitation
comes as the work of another mind. Some other person puts
extrinsic limits on what would otherwise be the naturally
good pursuit of one's own good. The "other," of course, is
authority. Nevertheless we should not think that authority's
restraint is altogether alien, for the opposition between a
person's private capacity and authority's common capacity is
not irresolvable. For the common good, in virtue of its
universal and indivisible fecundity, in principle perfects
each person in the community. And, correspondingly, each
person, if true to his or her social nature, maintains a
formal love of the common good.
This formal love provides a foundation for the cohesion of a
community. It is absolutely essential that there be common
ground between ruler and ruled. Both look to the same common
object as object of their perfection. Formal love of the
common good makes possible obedience to the rule of prudence;
a rule begotten of reason with view to the common good loved
materially.
Furthermore, we should observe a positive compensating
benefit to the private persons deriving from their
differentiation from authority. Authority, properly wielded,
frees private members for more concentrated pursuit of their
private interests. In so doing, authority respects the
mystery of individual persons exercising judgment on behalf
of private goods. Given that human passion and desires
target the good of others as well as self, and given the
ingenuity of practical reason, and presuming within the
community the existence of a critical mass of citizens with
regard for the common good -- it follows that a community that
frees its members to follow the lodestar of their personal
initiative is one most likely to enjoy the richest benefits
of man's spiritual nature.
Authority's Challenge. Authority is, of course, always
exercised by a person. Accordingly a community designates
persons, inclined by nature toward the particular objects of
their passions and desires, to hold in view, in a
transcending way, the common good of the community. Persons
in authority, considered precisely in their essential
functions as authority, are required to abstract themselves
from an exclusive material devotion to the private good of
themselves and their own. Again Plato in his
probed this challenge, calling our attention to the
consideration to be made by society providing for the
authoritative persons and the personal virtues required by
these persons if the community's actions are truly to be
channeled on behalf of the common good. It is difficult to
underestimate the personal difficulty, or to admire enough
the achievement, of those persons who release their personal
human capacities of will and reason on behalf of the common
good. The difficulty is perhaps evident in the widespread
suspicion of abuse of authority's power to advance one's own
family, friends, and personal fortune apart from concern for
the common good. The truth of such corruption is well
documented; the volumes of laws, ethical codes, and
procedures guiding legitimate use of authority demonstrate
its seeming inevitability. The evident potential for abuse
and the perennial history of corruption justifies a good
measure of suspicion; indeed it recommends that keenly
cautious prudence typical of the Federalist Papers. Yet
one must keep in mind that abuse does not take away use.
On Behalf of Authority. As we have seen, authority
signifies communal prudence; it names the fundamental source
of reason in the remarkable human capacity to act in consort,
to harmonize diverse wills and reasons and desires in order
to perfect the human community. Thus it appears that
authority is an intrinsically good thing. Furthermore, as we
have seen, authority appears in community in virtue of the
mysterious richness of the human spirit. First of all, the
plenitude of the human spirit gives rise to the functional
and subjective differentiations to which authority responds.
And secondly, the nobility of the human spirit shows in the
moral and intellectual virtue to which some individuals rise
in order to meet the challenge of authority's office. A
richness, we must admit, at times measured by the rot of
corruption its abuse breeds.
In this light we recall our opening remark on a counter-
intuitive feature of Simon's concept of authority. Simon
challenges the presumption of a contradictory opposition
between authority and individual freedom. Yet as our account
of authority has developed it has lost its contradictory
opposition to freedom. To be sure, pursuits of individual
and authoritative agents are separate: the common good
sought by authority is incommensurable with particular goods
sought by private persons, but this does not make a
contradiction. Furthermore, conflicts are possible, and it
would even seem that in the course of life's contingencies
some conflicts are an inevitable feature of the civic
landscape. However the acting soul of a human agent is rich
enough to bear within it a formal intention of the common
good alongside its material concern for the particular good,
thereby providing a basis for a resolution of conflicts when
they occur, a basis it should be noted, from within the
resources of liberty itself. That is to say, obedience to
authority expresses, rather than suppresses, an agent's
freedom. To be sure, in some cases obedience tempers or
disappoints one's drive for particular goods, yet that very
drive for particular goods is typically nourished by the
broad license well-ordered authority gives to private
initiative.
In light of Simon's general theory, we come to see that
authority's direct care for the common good indirectly
promotes individual creative pursuit of particular goods.
Likewise we see that it is the same human freedom which is
responsive to the dual claims of particular and common goods.
We do not want to minimize, much less deny, vital tensions
among hierarchical agents in civil society. We do hope to
have disclosed, however, the foundation of a deeper unity or
order in civil society: it lies in the vision of the human
spirit's freedom, in its practical reason; able to choose and
to love formally and materially both particular and common
goods. The difficulty of respecting these loves and goods in
theory and of doing them justice in practice may only be a
directly proportional measure of the ability of the human
spirit to do good by its own action.
Bibliographic Note
In this essay I have followed closely Yves Simon's A General
Theory of Authority, intro. by Vickan Kuic (Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962, 1980). The same
doctrine is developed in other of Simon's works, most
notably: Nature and Functions of Authority, The Aquinas
Lecture, 1940, 2nd printing (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette
University Press, 1948); Philosophy of Democratic
Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951);
and Freedom and Community, ed. by Charles P. O'Donnell (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1968).
Two recent studies of Simon on authority of note are S.
Iniobong Udicdem, Authority and the Common Good in Social
and Political Philosophy (Lanham, Ind.: University Press of
America, 1983), and Timothy Fuller, "Authority and the
Individual in Civil Associations: Oakeshott, Flathman, Yves
Simon," in Authority Revisited, ed. by J. Roland Pennock
and John W. Chapman, 131-51 (New York: New York University
Press, 1987).
On the topic of the common good I found the following
discussion helpful: Gregory Froelich, "The Equivocal Status
of the Bonum Commune," New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 38-57;
Jude P. Dougherty, "Keeping the Common Good in Mind," in
Studi Tomistici, ed. L. J. Elders and K. Hedwig, 188-201
(Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1984), and J. V.
Schall, "The Reality of Society in St. Thomas," Divus
Thomas 3 (1980): 13-23. Michael Novak's Free Persons and
the Common Good (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1989) provides
a challenging contrast to more traditional notions of the
common good, so much so that he all but begs the question of
authority, in spite of an appendix devoted to Simon.
Two contemporary thinkers who, like Simon, reflect out of a
deep learning and have a keen sense of the meaning and role
of authority in society are Hannah Arendt (see her "What is
Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in
Political Thought> (New York: Penguin, 1977), and (New York: Viking, 1963); and professor of Roman
Law, Alvaro d'Ors (see Frederick Wilhelmsen's "An
Introduction to the Thought of Alvaro d'Ors," Political
Science Reviewer, 1990).
William A. Frank has a doctorate in philosophy from
Catholic University of America. He is currently chairman of
the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas.
This article was taken from the Winter 1990 issue of "Faith &
Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101
Shenandoah Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900,
Fax 703-636-1655. Published quarterly at $20.00 per year.
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